- Year
- 1971
- By
- Green, Constance McLaughlin, and Milton Lomask
- Section
- NASA — General & Institutional
- Shelf
- L10
- Catalog
- Catalog F · NASA Missions
Published by Smithsonian Institution Press, City of Washington, 1971, with a foreword by Charles A. Lindbergh dated 11 August 1969.
Lindbergh’s foreword recounts his own encounters with the satellite program, including a visit to the Army’s Redstone Arsenal where Wernher von Braun showed him a satellite mock-up and estimated he could have orbited a satellite months before Sputnik I had funding been approved. Winner of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ History Manuscript Award.
Fourteen chapters trace Project Vanguard from the background of early space exploration and the fight for government support, through vehicle-specification battles, range and tracking-system construction, early test firings, the shock of Sputnik I, and the eventual TV-3 failure and later successes, to the National Academy of Sciences’ scientific harvest and a final accounting of the program.
